Well done lads, now let me rain on your parade

As Jonny Wilkinson's drop kick somersaulted awkwardly between the posts, I leapt from the sofa, arms aloft, and bellowed exultantly. Moments later, when the final whistle blew, my host instantly produced a bottle of Champagne, which we drained with shameless haste. Then another bottle to wash down a late breakfast of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on thick slices of toast.

On a grim winter's morning, they were heady moments, wonderful moments, blissful moments. It had been a great match and the side we wanted to win had done so and become champions of the world.

I'm up for a bit of unrestrained nationalism at moments such as these. They leave you - at least they do me - high on euphoria, soaring above life's little woes. Recreational nationalism, I call it, and it's OK as long as it's allowed to evaporate in the hours that follow, leaving a residue that's just enough to buck you up from time to time.

It's the overblown set pieces that I can't be doing with. In this instance, the elevation of celebration to a point where it became triumphalism, which, as the Oxford dictionary puts it, is excessive exultation over one's success or achievements. Also, whatever the circumstances, there's something slightly unsettling about carefully staged parades that are essentially about people worship.

Far better that, rather like our football clubs after winning the FA Cup, the England rugby team should have been driven straight to a suitable vantage point when they arrived home for some spontaneous fêting of their triumph. Thereafter, celebration of the team's success would have served the game better if it had been focused on club grounds around the country rather than the over-catered-for freeloaders of London.

I am glad to say that since I first wrote these words straight after the parade, a version of this idea has been adopted by the Rugby Football Union, although taking the Webb Ellis Cup around 30 venues will not happen until the spring. It wasn't as if England's success was entirely unexpected and the RFU could have seized the moment with a series of well-publicised appearances by members of the victorious team on match days over Christmas and the New Year.

This would have brought people - regulars and potential recruits - to rugby stadiums with the World Cup still fresh in their memories and would have been a much more equitable way of engaging children, so many of whom missed out last Monday because of being at school or living miles away.

In 1966, the football team appeared on the balcony of a hotel in west London late on the evening of their World Cup triumph and that was about it. I don't remember columnists fulminating against a lack of proper recognition for the team or people clamouring for Bobby, Nobby and the lads to be borne down Oxford Street atop a sawn-off double-decker.

Of course the world has changed since then. Sportsmen have joined the ranks of celebrities and now that wars are fought and won by clever machines rather than brave men and women, celebrities have replaced traditional heroes, ever more conditioned to receive our worship. We can't blame Martin Johnson and his England rugby team for this, but surely we can make more of an effort to get things in proportion.

My heart sunk when I heard we must endure another two weeks of World Cup hoopla topped off by an orgasm of frenzy, led and orchestrated by the media, when the day of the parade eventually arrived. Living close to central London, I could have got there in no time, but it would have needed the England front five to drag me there.

It didn't take long on the day itself for my worst fears to be confirmed. Breakfast television interviewed a lady from Loughborough, her face painted with the cross of St George, who had arrived in Trafalgar Square at midnight. She had already been standing in the freezing cold for seven hours. Six hours remained before the players made it to the square. And she was surrounded by many others.

This is coming disturbingly close to the sort of fanaticism inspired by cult leaders who then invite their followers to quaff some murky brew that will transport them to a better place.

Another of my misgivings about the parade was that the inevitable saturation television coverage would be unbearably mawkish. I made myself watch it briefly and was duly appalled. Players, whose celebrity is based on their being good at a physical ball game, were constantly pressed to tell us something interesting, which, mostly and understandably - and partly because of the relentlessly unimaginative interrogation - they were incapable of doing. Instead we were fed excruciating banalities, the worst of which was the recurring: 'I'll remember this day for the rest of my life.' Hardly surprising this when, for the rest of their lives, they will also remember the day their pet rabbit escaped, they threw up for the first time after drinking too much, got rejected by the not-very-pretty girl they didn't really fancy anyway, etc etc.

Some of the reporting, too, was dreadful. One ITV employee stationed in Piccadilly Circus reminded us that this was where people gathered to celebrate the end of the Second World War. 'That was big, but this is bigger.' Really. That was it. The daytime nonsense on those few channels that weren't showing the parade was welcome refuge.

I'm not saying that, in the circumstances, the parade should not have taken place. Clearly, with three-quarters of a million people turning out to watch it - and with a huge TV audience - there was a national need. It's just a pity that we have reached a state where we feel this need, particularly after a thing as slight as a rugby victory.